World's Quietest Computer Packs a Powerful Punch

Not the Puget Serenity Pro, the world's quietest computer. It's so quiet, you can't hear any noise coming from it at all. Yet it runs the fastest third-generation Intel Core i7 quad-core processor, and has a graphics card that can drive four monitors at the same time and play serious games.

Impressive specs — but does it deliver?

I know, we're all hearing that the trend is toward tablets and mobile platforms, even beyond ultrabooks. Desktops are dead, we're told. People want to get their information on the go — on mobile phones, on tiny ultrabook laptops, on tablets, on convertible notebooks and on devices that are too big to be smartphones and too small to be tablets.

That trend toward miniaturization and mobility doesn't apply to everyone, though. What if you want to get lots of compute-intensive work done? What about gaming with high resolution and frame rates? You're going to need multiple monitors, more power, fast disks, and plenty of ports.

And if you need to concentrate for long days of complicated analysis, gaming, exploring and editing on all those monitors, you need quiet.

Why is silence so important? Beyond any personal preference, there's real data backing up the benefits of a quiet workplace. According to Scientific American, studies show that the presence of constant background noise contributes to stress. It hampers concentration.

You might not feel it immediately, but the sound of that whirring, whining, humming, squealing or hissing PC in the background could actually "decrease higher brain function, impairing learning and memory," say researchers.

Silence is golden. There's good reason why such clichés persist.

So we search for the perfectly silent yet enormously powerful PC. And Puget Systems delivers: a quad-core machine with extraordinary power, a fast, quiet solid-state drive and a graphics card that can handle just about anything you throw at it. And it does all that with complete silence. Sure, it makes some sound, but you can't hear it unless you place your ear directly on the PC case itself. In other words, there's no way for this PC to be any quieter.

To give you some personal perspective, many of the applications I run (Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Dragon NaturallySpeaking) can bring even a powerful PC to its knees. I abhor that constant droning that comes from cooling fans. Even the noise of my 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, known for its specially tuned quiet fans, gets out of hand when I run too many applications at the same time. That's why I'm always looking for the quietest components.

Two years ago, I found just the right computer for the job with an earlier version of the Puget Serenity system. I reviewed it, and liked the review unit so much I bought it from the company.

Now I want to work with additional monitors, though, and that's the weakness of that completely silent box. Graphics cards are the noisiest component inside of most computers. Two years ago, there wasn't a quiet card that was powerful enough to run multiple 30-inch displays and two others at the same time.

So I jumped at the chance to review the latest Puget Serenity Pro system, now with Intel's fastest and most efficient Ivy Bridge quad-core 3.5GHz processor. It offers a nearly silent graphics card that can handle four monitors — two of which are 30-inch screens — without even breathing hard.

How does Puget make these machines so quiet? The GeForce graphics card's ultra-quiet fans goes a long way toward keep things quiet, but there's more. Fans are what make the most noise, so the quietest fans in the world have gone into this box. For CPU cooling, there's the super-quiet fan called a Gelid Tranquillo, and it doesn't make a sound. Not a peep. The PC's power supply has a fan on it, too, but it's so quiet you can't hear it.

Then there's the Antec P183 case with its "AcoustiPack" sound-dampening material installed. It's like a padded cell inside. With all of that foam distributed strategically throughout the case, it keeps what little sound there is from escaping. In addition, the case fans have been upgraded for silence.

The result is a PC that makes less than 11dB of noise — that's 1dB above the threshold of human hearing. Even when slamming it with multiple operations, the loudest it gets is 13dB, still a level of sound that was way beyond my detection unless I put my ear right next to the computer.

In its quest for quiet, has Puget Systems neglected the possibility of overheating? The company is so confident that it is hospitably cool inside its computer that it ships a infrared photo of the each unit's thermal image profile. Take a look at the gallery below, and you'll see the before-and-after thermal images we received with this unit. Despite its silence and blazing speed, this PC is one cool customer.

As the PC's Windows 8 Pro installation booted, the only sound I heard out of this PC is its little beep at the beginning of its boot sequence. It was equipped with an Intel Core i7 3770 K3770K 3.5GHz quad-core processor, 16GB of Kingston DDR3 1600 RAM, an Intel 520 120GB SATA solid-state drive (SSD), as well as a 2TB Western Digital Green spinning hard drive for secondary storage. Then there was the best part of this package, an Asus GeForce GTX 670 2GB graphics card, with enough video ports to run four monitors.

Do I have any complaints? I have a few, but they're mostly superficial. I'm not crazy about that Antec case, which looks nondescript and boring. The machine had trouble restarting a couple of times, but I'm not sure if that was the fault of Windows 8 or this PC. And the Serenity Pro's $2104.80 price gave me sticker shock, but perhaps that amount is reasonable considering the price of higher-end notebooks.

To sum up, I love this ultraquiet and super-powerful computer. Its minimalist design is not much to look at — a drab gunmetal-colored box — but that goes along with the rest of the philosophy of this machine. It doesn't call attention to itself. It's not a showoff. But the Puget Serenity Pro is a formidable performer.

It's not cheap, but if you've been looking for that unlikely combination of power and silence, you've found it.

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